If I could take a stab at what this author neglected to do: Apple will become the company that manages your digital life, providing you with both the devices and the ecosystem to make sense of an increasingly complex and fragmented array of technologies. In the near future it will do so primarily through media: music, books, tv, video, social networking, consolidating these and other features into a neat package that the average condumer can pick up and comprehend. As technology becomes more pervasive, it will incorporate the appliances in our home into its ecosystem. It won't be the only company on the block to do this, Google is going there and Amazon looks like its headed in that direction. But it already has a huge headstart which will make it #1 or #2, a spot that justifies a mega market cap in a future dominated by technology. The future will be just to complex and rich with technology for the prevailing open source "fragmented" status approach to make sense to the average consumers. As far its current mega cap status, if you consider that Apple is like an amalgam of pieces of Microsoft, Dell, Sony, Samsung and many others, its size is well justified.